


heart on my sleeve

by pallasjoanna



Series: in any world, in any story (Kurotsuki Week 2016) [2]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Barista Kuroo, KuroTsuki Week 2016, Love Confessions, M/M, Post-it Notes, Prompt: Work, med student tsukki, sort of i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 19:47:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7375051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasjoanna/pseuds/pallasjoanna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tsukishima writes, <i>Kuroo Tetsurou is a mythical morning being who stalks all of your Post-its and wakes up at 5:00 for fun.</i></p><p>Tetsurou must be grinning so hard right now, and he can feel his heart beating a million a minute, seeing his name written out by Tsukishima Kei.  “I’m very flattered that you’re choosing to leave your first lasting impression on the world by writing about me.”</p><p>There's nothing delicate in how Tsukishima flushes red.</p><p>--<br/>(Or in which Kuroo works at a café and Tsukishima expresses himself better through Post-it notes.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	heart on my sleeve

“Good morning, Tsukishima-san! What would you like to order today?”

Tsukishima blearily squints—his own sleepy version of a glare—at Tetsurou’s sudden, almost mocking formality. “So you do actually work here. I was starting to think that it was just a myth.”

“I also thought you were a mythical being in the mornings—“ In more ways than one. Tetsurou leans over the counter. The café lights give Tsukishima this strange warm glow. “—but here you are. Tell me, on a scale of one to ten, how bad is your schedule?”

Tsukishima looks at him dead in the eye, a veritable look of a med student’s long suffering and resignation. “Like one of those ungodly French numbers. I have a class at nine. My last class ends at eight thirty. In the evening.”

“Holy hell.”

“And I have an exam today. So, black coffee, to go, please and thank you.”

“As black as the soulless void, got it.” Tetsurou gestures at the mostly empty café; it gets busier in the afternoons and evenings. “Just sit somewhere for a while.”

Rain starts to pour outside just as he’s done with Tsukishima’s order. It takes him several seconds to find Tsukishima at first; he’s seated in the lower bunk hidden behind one of the café’s giant stuffed toys, long legs curled and settled primly on a couple of floor cushions. One of his arms is extended, a finger tracing the writings on the wall.

The café is famous for a lot of things: its heavenly desserts, the giant stuffed toys, the Instagram-worthy aesthetic of the place, but what they’re most arguably famous for may be the Post-it notes. Colorful ones line the walls, posts, along the lines stringing the photos, including one smack on the center of the ceiling that Tetsurou hasn’t figured out how a customer got it there. Probably gymnastics, or a couple of selfie sticks taped together.

Tsukishima regards the Post-it notes with a fascination that leaves his lecture notes abandoned on the low table. He also doesn’t notice Tetsurou bearing his dark matter coffee yet, which is fine really. Tetsurou could stand here all day looking at this unguarded sliver of Tsukishima’s profile.

“I don’t think you’ve ever left a Post-it note at this place,” he says instead, placing the coffee on the table.

Tsukishima turns to face him, but he doesn’t pull away from the wall. It makes Tetsurou feel extremely gratified. “How would you know that?”

“Sometimes I’m early to my shift, like maybe five?” Tetsurou adds the last bit just to see the look of horror on Tsukishima’s face. “I read the new notes for fun. And I’d recognize your handwriting anywhere.”

Tsukishima snorts. “Obviously you’ve never seen my shorthand in uni.”

“So you’ve never left a Post-it note,” Tetsurou says.

“…Were you even listening to any part of my sentence? But fine. Yes.”

“Come on, Tsukki.” Tetsurou climbs into the bunk and shoves a napkin at him. “Just write something like, ‘Tsukishima Kei was here’ if you can’t think of anything. Why do you even visit our esteemed café if not to leave a lasting impression on the world with a Post-it note?”

Tsukishima gives him a look. “I’m not going to leave a lasting impression with something that generic.”

Tetsurou grins, but then he winces when Tsukishima produces the most obnoxious neon yellow Post-it pad from his bag. It is so obnoxiously neon—Tetsurou cannot stress it enough—that it’s going to haunt him in his dreams. It must be helpful for those all-nighters Tsukishima pulls. Tsukishima shoots him a glare when Tetsurou tries reading over his shoulder, and when he’s done, he slaps it on a blank section of the wall without much fanfare.

On it, written in Tsukishima’s careful handwriting— _Kuroo Tetsurou is a mythical morning being who stalks all of your Post-its and wakes up at 5:00 for fun._

“It’s called transcending the need for coffee, Tsukishima-kun.” Tetsurou must be grinning so hard right now, and he can feel his heart beating a million a minute, seeing his name written out by Tsukishima Kei. “I’m also very flattered that you’re choosing to leave your first lasting impression on the world by writing about me.”

There’s nothing delicate in how Tsukishima flushes red; his face turns blotchy and his nose violently scrunches up in a way that makes Tetsurou want to coo. Tsukishima grabs his coffee, gets out of the bunk and makes a show producing his umbrella from his bag. “I cannot believe you. And would you look at the time. I’m going to be late.”

Tetsurou follows him. “The mythical being says it’s still eight in the morning!”

“ _Late_ ,” Tsukishima deadpans as he exits the café with a slight wave.

 

*

 

Tsukishima enters the café at seven forty-five in the morning again a couple of days later.

“Shitty schedule day?” Tetsurou asks.

Tsukishima shifts his weight from foot to foot, likely due to the bulging bookbag slung on his shoulder. He looks better than he did on Tuesday morning. “Not really. My class is still in the afternoon, but I need to study for another exam. I keep on falling asleep in my own apartment.”

“Here I thought you just wanted to see me, Tsukki,” he teases.

“I just needed another reminder about how your hair goes against all known physical laws,” Tsukishima says.

“Yup, you do need the coffee. I think you’ve already said something like that two weeks ago.”

Tsukishima rolls his eyes and stalks off to the bunk behind the giant stuffed toy.

Tetsurou doesn’t bother Tsukishima—except to bring his coffee—until the end of his shift, just when the noisier crowd starts to pour in. Tsukishima seems to have made some sort of nest in the bunk. He’s slouched over the table with papers and hardbound books surrounding him on all sides, and neon yellow Post-its punctuate the space he’s in. It’s a mess that he doesn’t expect of Tsukishima, but there are a lot of things Tetsurou has only found out when he finally crossed paths with him again in university. In Tokyo.

It’s the little things like these—Tsukishima’s furrowed brow, his teeth sinking into his bottom lip in utter concentration, the furious way he scribbles out a note on his yellow Post-its (FUCKING CILIATED PSEUDOSTRATIFIED COLUMNAR EPITHELIUM, one reads) that makes heat unfurl in Tetsurou’s gut. It’s not quite a burn, more like the pleasant heat of the sun on early mornings just when the chill of dawn starts to fade.

Tsukishima doesn’t notice Tetsurou yet until he knocks on the wood of the bunk with an apologetic smile.

“My shift’s done,” he informs him. “I’ll be heading on to my review class, ‘kay?”

Tsukishima blinks, slowly reorienting himself into the present. “Okay.”

The next morning, Tetsurou sees the note about the pseudostratified columnar epithelium right next to Tsukishima’s note about Tetsurou. He doesn’t know if Tsukishima purposely pasted it there or if he left it and one of the other employees found something amusing about whatever an epithelium was, but Tetsurou likes to imagine that it’s the former.

Maybe Tsukishima had pressed it to the wall, laughing quietly at his own almost unrecognizable shorthand.

 

*

 

It quickly becomes a routine, like people roasting Tetsurou for his hair, like drinks on Friday nights and the Sunday Evening Committee that everyone from their high school volleyball years seems to have gone to at least once.

(“This is a gang,” Tsukishima states in a flat voice as Oikawa, a one-person rumor mill, starts his usual Sunday evening trash talk. Not that he can trash talk about his favorite topic, mostly Ushiwaka, because the said person happens to be there in the café that evening. “I can’t believe you inducted me into a gang.”

“Awareness doesn’t exempt you from bad decisions, Tsukki,” Tetsurou cheerfully replies.)

Tetsurou is always the first to arrive at five or six in the morning. He opens the café, starts up the coffeemaker, and bakes a batch of cupcakes that he cannot reasonably mess up. When his other coworkers start arriving, he likes to take several minutes to scour the bunks for new Post-its, whether it’s about students bemoaning their exams, declarations of friendship and/or love, or of inspirational quotes and sweet nothings. He finds it romantic, the way that everything gives him the tiniest insight into the life of a person he’ll most likely never know.

And then there’s Tsukishima. For someone who is adamantly not a morning person, Tsukishima always arrives at seven forty-five with his bookbag and hair still curling wet at the tips. He always orders black coffee, sometimes with a slice of strawberry shortcake or a red velvet cupcake, to go every Tuesday but he usually stays in for a few hours the rest of the week. Tsukishima always takes the bunk behind the giant stuffed toy, and Tetsurou always brings his order to him instead of calling his name at the counter. More notes in neon yellow fill the wall in an orderly grid: something about coagulation pathways, ‘ _I prefer strawberries_ ’, ‘ _Your knowledge about dinosaurs is laughably abysmal_ ’, ‘ _Thank you for the ride home last Friday_ ’.

Their early morning encounters go unmentioned to the Sunday Evening Committee, not quite by any deliberate choice. Tetsurou simply doesn’t see the need to interject it somewhere. If he’s being honest, he likes it like this, like the early mornings in the café with Tsukishima are a secret all on their own, that small bunk behind the giant stuffed toy a space temporarily removed from the rest of the universe.

Their routine breaks once. It’s not a Tuesday, rather, a calm Wednesday, and Tetsurou is entertaining a first-time customer when Tsukishima enters the café.

Tetsurou isn’t new to dating; he knows how this whole dance goes, can recognize the blatant interest in this other person’s eyes as they chat. They aren’t bad on the eyes either and maybe before, Tetsurou would have indulged this, but he doesn’t quite feel like putting the effort into something he knows will be half-hearted in the end.

He still accepts the number that they press into his palm though, just in case.

“’Morning, Tsukki!” he chirps when it’s Tsukishima’s turn in the line, but something in Tsukishima’s face makes him reluctant to push his usual schadenfreude at being a morning person amongst people who aren’t.

Tsukishima has a scowl on his face, even deeper than the one that expresses his dislike for early mornings, and his eyes are fixed on some point on Tetsurou’s cheek. There’s nothing there though when Tetsurou moves to wipe a hand against it.

“Bad day?” he asks softly, already moving to write down his order.

“Maybe.” Tsukishima doesn’t elaborate further. “Black coffee, to go, please.”

Tetsurou raises an eyebrow, but if Tsukishima is determined not to say anything, then he won’t force it. He’ll have to ask him some other time.

But Tsukishima doesn’t come to the café the next day. Or the day after that.

 

*

 

When Tsukishima still doesn’t show up the next Tuesday despite Tetsurou’s concerned messages to him, there are really only two possibilities at this point. One, that Tsukishima is swamped in enough work to drown in, or two, Tetsurou did something.

He knows it’s not the former because he still saw Tsukishima for Friday drinks and the Sunday Evening Committee, despite the both of them only saying a polite word to each other. And really, Tetsurou knows of only one thing he might have done on that day. He’s not saying that a customer flirting with him and him partially reciprocating it may have caused Tsukishima’s lack of visits. Correlation does not equal causation.

He knows Tsukishima doesn’t have an issue with him not being straight. But if it’s not that, and if the phone number still sitting the pockets of one of Tetsurou’s jeans caused Tsukishima’s lack of visits, then does that mean—

 

*

 

“Who’s that customer you’re fond of again? Tsukishima-san?” His coworker Kimura had subbed for him during his shift since Tetsurou brought his grandmother to the hospital this morning. “He stopped by earlier. Said he was looking for you.”

Tetsurou trips on that one hellbound jutting wooden plank. He hasn’t tripped on anything in here since his first day. “Really?” he says, as casual as can be. “Did he say anything?”

“Nope, he just took his coffee and left.”

Kimura had barely finished his sentence before Tetsurou stepped around the damned wooden plank and half-ran to the bunk behind the giant stuffed toy.

But Tsukishima’s Post-it notes are in a neat three-by-three grid, still the same number since Tetsurou saw it last. He sighs, about to go back to the counter and send another message to Tsukishima instead, when he notices a piece of paper sticking out from underneath the latest one.

It’s still neon yellow, it’s still Tsukishima’s handwriting—small cramped and careful instead of his hasty shorthand—and while there’s no name attached to it, Tetsurou thinks, lets himself hope that it’s for him.

So he reads it.

 

*

 

_You asked me once why I bothered visiting the café._

_First of all, that’s because of this gang you’ve tricked me into, but you already know I don’t only go on Sunday evenings. Second, the coffee here is cheaper than the Starbucks the next street over. Third, it’s because I heard that you worked part-time here, but I never asked when your shift is, so I had to try and guess. You just had to pick an ungodly morning shift, didn’t you?_

_After training camp back in first year, I wanted to see you even if I was all the way back in Miyagi and you were in Tokyo. I still do._

*

 

(A confession:

Somewhere in those two and a half years when their phones and volleyball were all that connected Tetsurou in Tokyo to Tsukishima in Miyagi, he knows that his fascination with Tsukishima turned into a genuine crush. It wasn’t sudden, perhaps just a little bit painful—pining always is. But Tsukishima was a high schooler, and Tetsurou was busy with his major, and there wasn’t really a need to bring it up. It had simmered into an ever-present slow-burning flame at the back of his mind by the time Tsukishima started to go to university in Tokyo.

Sometimes, Tetsurou looks at Tsukishima, in the mornings or in the evenings, either with a scowl or with a small warm smile spreading across his face and he thinks, with all the fondness and resignation he can muster, _God, I like you so much_.)

 

*

 

Tetsurou is a man on a mission.

He buys the most obnoxiously neon pink pad of Post-its he can find. It’s so obnoxious and neon and pink that there are afterimages burned into the inside of his eyelids. He feels like dying inside every time he looks at it from out the corner of his eye.

In those five seconds when Tetsurou sees Tsukishima’s two-meter self through the windows at exactly seven forty-five in the morning, his face obscured by the Post-it notes hall of fame, he runs into the kitchen and hisses “Cover for me!” to one of the newbies. It’s not one of his more dignified moments. The sacrificial newbie looks like she’s about to piss her pants after talking to Tsukishima, and she looks entirely relieved as Tetsurou tells her that he’ll be the one making the order.

Tsukishima’s face is turned to the wall when Tetsurou comes bearing his black hole of a coffee, but this time, he notices it when Tetsurou casts a shadow over the table just before he climbs into the bunk.

Tsukishima whips around so fast, his expression nothing short of a deer in the headlights. “Kuroo—I—“

Tetsurou would gladly let him finish at any other time, but first, he puts down the coffee on the table, takes out his pad of Post-its, detaches one from the rest.

Then he unceremoniously sticks it onto Tsukishima’s mouth.

Tsukishima’s eyes grow wide.

There is a beat of silence. The air feels like it’s imploding in Tetsurou’s ears. He slides Tsukishima’s heavy textbook to the farthest side of the table.

Tsukishima looks as if he’s already considering that option. His expression is blotchy and red and nothing short of murderous. “ _Kuroo_.”

Tetsurou hums.

“ _Why the fuck_ do I have a Post-it note on my mouth?”

Tsukishima doesn’t make a move to remove the said offending piece of paper from his upper lip. Tetsurou kindly does so for him, holding it in front of Tsukishima’s face for him to read.

Admittedly, it had taken a good portion of the night for him to figure out what to say because Tsukishima’s maybe-confession deserves one equally as heartfelt. Tetsurou knows he has a lot to say; he’s been lowkey pining for more than three years, and he doesn’t know how to condense it into a Post-it note like Tsukishima did.

So he doesn’t, and he keeps it short and simple.

Tsukishima pinches the piece of paper from his fingers and holds it closer, as if the words _‘Do you wanna go out this Saturday?_ ’ are going to rearrange themselves if he stares hard enough. He might be shaking a bit.

“It’s my day off and you don’t have any classes,” Tetsurou explains, keeping his voice steady even if his hands are fidgeting in his lap. “We could get post-hangover coffee together, if you want.”

Tsukishima stares a bit more. “So basically, you’re asking me out in the early morning. On Saturday.”

Tetsurou licks his dry lips. “Yeah. Or if you want to sleep in, I’m fine with afternoon. Afternoon’s good too.”

“…”

“You know, it’s only polite to say yes or no, Tsukki.”

“I swear,” Tsukishima growls, “I really can’t believe you sometimes.” But he whips his own Post-its out of his bag and furiously scribbles something, pasting it on top of Tetsurou’s hair. He escapes with his coffee just as Tetsurou pulls it off, a giant bold ‘YES’ nearly tearing through the paper.

“Hey!” Tetsurou scrambles out of the bunk. What few people in the café are staring at the both of them, and yet he can’t quite bring himself to wipe the probably manic shit-eating grin off his face. “I’ll pick you up at seven forty-five!”

Tsukishima turns back for a brief second, nods, blushing harder than any neon pink paper before he storms out of the café.

 

 

*

(“So first order of business, Tetsu-chan. Tsukki-chan.“ Oikawa looks entirely smug at the Sunday Evening Committee that week. Tetsurou realizes that Oikawa has pitched his voice loud enough to carry over the tables, and Iwaizumi is nowhere to be found. “I see you’ve finally resolved your sexual tension over the weekend!”

Tsukishima groans and buries his face in Tetsurou’s shoulder. “God, Oikawa. Please shut up.”)

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> so um... anyways
> 
> \- The cafe mentioned here is a mishmash of all the milk tea shops and coffee shops (they are legion I swear) around my school, but it's mostly based on this [one](http://mycebu.ph/article/cafe-namoo-city-time-square/).  
> \- I'm a premed student. I finally realize that a doctor's handwriting is not so much a choice as it is an inevitability.  
> \- For the curious people, epithelium is one of the four basic tissue types in humans and animals (epithelium, connective tissue, muscle, nervous). Pseudostratified columnar epithelium is one of the kinds of epithelium you find in the respiratory tract.  
> \- I'm channeling my extreme dislike of Histology through Tsukki.  
> \- The Sunday Evening Committee basically started with the third year captains and their friends looking to unwind on Sunday nights. Oikawa's gossip and trash talking is a weekly highlight.  
> \- Okay, the reason why Tsukishima didn't visit the cafe for a while is because he's embarrassed. He's suspected it for a while, but he's just realized that he likes Kuroo, has liked Kuroo since who knows when, and he was deciding whether or not to do something about it. Hence the Post-it confession.
> 
> tell me what you think! [tumblr](http://pallasjoannas.tumblr.com/)


End file.
